No proof New Jersey registered 35,000 noncitizens to vote

In July 2026, U.S. President Donald Trump claimed in a post on Truth Social, his social media platform, that the Department of Homeland Security found 35,152 registered voters in New Jersey who were not U.S. citizens. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin also shared the claim earlier that day, saying that DHS released the number a week prior.

The two Republican officials appeared to be responding to a statement released by New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill, a Democrat, announcing that a “serious software error” mistakenly placed 6,600 noncitizens who affirmed they were not U.S. citizens on the state’s voter registration list between June 2023 and June 2024. (Sherrill was not governor of New Jersey at the time — it was Phil Murphy, also a Democrat.)

Snopes readers wrote in looking for more information about the claims of unregistered voters. We contacted Sherrill’s office as part of researching this story. Spokesperson Darwin Pham said that the governor’s office did not know how DHS had arrived at its figure (35,152), and that the 6,600 figure Sherrill cited came directly from the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission, where the faulty software was installed. 

Questioning the integrity of U.S. elections without providing evidence to support the claim is one of the core themes of Trump’s political career, and neither he nor Mullin provided evidence for their claim about New Jersey. Even the original DHS statement, which also made similar unsubstantiated claims about California, Nevada and Pennsylvania, hedged the accusation: “There may be as many as 35,152 non-citizens registered to vote in New Jersey,” it read. 

Snopes has done the research time and time again to disprove claims questioning the integrity of U.S. elections. Voter fraud is incredibly rare, noncitizens voting is even more rare, and there are many safeguards states put in place to ensure the legitimacy of U.S. elections.

In this case, we’ve rated the claim mostly false instead of false because Sherrill’s statement acknowledged that New Jersey did recently find a smaller number of noncitizens, 6,600, on its voter rolls. According to her statement, she immediately ordered those people to be taken off of the rolls and is working to replace the vendor who provided the buggy software.  

According to Sherrill’s statement, the software placed the affected people on voter rolls when they applied for driver’s licenses or state IDs. The people were asked whether they were U.S. citizens and answered no, but the software placed them on voter rolls anyway. She said fewer than 400 of the mistakenly registered voters, who were scattered across the state with varying partisan affiliations, cast ballots.

Snopes reviewed all of New Jersey’s state-level elections held since 2023. Two elections, both for seats in the state Legislature, were decided by fewer than 400 votes. Sherrill said there was no evidence the mistakenly registered voters had flipped an election. 

For further reading about Trump’s claims of election fraud, we’ve previously covered his assertion that he lost the 2016 popular vote only because there were “millions of people” who illegally cast ballots for Hillary Clinton and his speech in 2020 in which he claimed to have won that year’s election and alleged “a major fraud on our nation.” We’ve also written about his claim that noncitizens were voting in federal elections during the 2024 cycle.

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